South Africa Isn’t Post-Racial Either
Conversations about race in places like Cape Town sound eerily similar to those happening in the United States.
Reuters/ Mike Hutchings
Robert Jensen, Color Lines
Apartheid is dead in South Africa, but a new version of white supremacy lives on.
“During apartheid, the racism of white people was up front, and we knew what we were dealing with,” Nkwame Cedile, a Black South African, told me. “Now white people smile at us, but for most Black people the unemployment and grinding poverty and dehumanizing conditions of everyday life haven’t changed. So, what kind of commitment to justice is under that smile?”
As he offered me his views on the complex politics of his country, Cedile, a field worker in Cape Town for the People’s Health Movement, expressed a frustration I heard often in my two weeks in the country: Yes, the brutality of apartheid ended in 1994 with free elections, but the white-supremacist ideas didn’t magically evaporate.
That shouldn’t be surprising. How could centuries of white supremacy simply disappear in 15 years? What did surprise me (as a white U.S. citizen) is how much discussions about race in South Africa sounded just like conversations in the United States.
